Midterm on ENGI9614 Renewable Energy and Resource Conservation was a traditional exam you'd see in most engineering courses in Finland as well. There were theory questions and some calculations. The test was two hours, and nobody left the class room before the time ran out, so there was probably too many questions. The questions themselves were alright, although not very consistent in terms of complexity. E.g. one question might be about differences of energy efficiency and energy conservation (which could be deduced from the terms themselves) and the next about pressure composition isotherm curves of solid hydrogen storage material. And keep in mind, this is an introductory course to renewable energy, and even though I've studied energy technology for four years I had never heard about solid materials for hydrogen storage before this course. So I'd consider that quite advanced (which is fine for me) and not very relevant for an introductory course, but since solid hydrogen storage was also the teacher's PhD thesis subject I get why she would include it. There were also fill a blank questions, which can be quite infuriating, because if you didn't answer using the same word(s) as in the lecture slides it would be marked as false (even though the answer might be technically correct). But overall the test was OK, and not too hard.
Midterm on ENGI9627 Environmental Systems Engineering consisted of 8 calculation questions / optimization problems. Again, nobody left the class before the three hour time limit (I had time to finish 6/8 questions). The subject of the course is pretty hard to explain, so an example is probably the easiest way to describe it. E.g. if you had two kinds of oils (domestic and foreign) with different properties and you had to mix them to create certain amounts of premium and regular fuels, how much of each oil would you use for each fuel mix? And then there might be a table of oil properties and required fuel properties, prices of each oil and fuel, etc. Objective might be to maximize the profit while satisfying the requirements, and you would do that by using different algorithms or methods. I find this actually a useful skill to have, and fortunately there're computer programs (e.g. Excel add-ins) that allow you to do this. So I might just actually apply this knowledge sometime in the future. Questions of this midterm were alright and something I had expected, but the time limit was just very brutal.
Other than midterms and school stuff, there's been fun events such as Halloween (that people actually celebrate here), Mardi Gras (basically a Halloween festival) and Beerlympics (you figure it out). There are also intramurals (student sport games against each other), and I'm playing football (soccer) and volleyball. It's a nice way to do something healthy every once in a while. Also, couple of pictures below.
-Aapo
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| Air motor. Each of us made one of these in a lab (in a course called Production Technology), which was pretty interesting. All parts were milled/turned/drilled/tapped. This thing can do about 2500RPM on pressurized air, which is a respectable amount. It works by blowing air to the cylinder in the back, and the air drives a piston (attached to a crankshaft) like in a traditional internal combustion engine. There're intake and exhaust "valves" in the flat plate (holes on both sides, they run to the backside of the flat plate), and the valves "open" based on the position of the cylinder (not the piston!). |
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| I told one of the guys how people like to eat canned tuna in the Finnish army. Couple of days later he comes to my door with these beauties. Dining hall is alright, but there aren't many things that can beat proper sissitonnikala. |
